Reason I asked is I've been doing some experimental work with it for a while and thought I'd compare notes.

First, sourcing the material.

We buy a 1/4 beef from a local rancher and have the packer save the large femur bones. They cut the joints off and cut the mid portion into about 6" lengths. I boil all these for about 12 hours, save the 'juice' to add to the dogs' food and the knuckles for them to gnaw on. Now the problem is mounting the more or less straight pieces on the lathe to get 'em round.

I've been able to drive them with the scroll chuck plus live center in the tail stock end but since bones are rarely round and have varying wall thickness it's pretty hard to know where the inside is when I'm roughing the outside to round. Then when I do manage to get one done outside, there never seems to be enough left to turn the inside without going through one or the other sides.

So in order to safely mount the bone securely in the chuck what I came up with was casting one end in epoxy. Using an empty yogurt cup and about three pumps worth of epoxy from the West Systems pump cans provides a pretty solid perfectly round 'handle' if you will that I should be able to grasp fairly well with the chuck.

I'll grab a couple pictures later this morning for illustration. Haven't tried actually mounting one of these on the lathe yet.

Yeah, scraping seems to be the way to go. It does cut with a gouge but it's kinda dicey.

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